re: Email from Lisa

Got this email from Lisa today and justing trying to share with as many as possible.

Hey y'all:

I am guessing that by now, all of you noticed that Pathfinder Online isn't coming up when you try to log in. The website is also down. Here is the scoop. I will caveat that I am not a techy (at least not a techy from this decade) and Bob threw a lot of this at me in rapid succession, so I may have gotten some of it wrong. But here goes.

A day ago, the building that we house all of our servers in in downtown Seattle had a catastrophic destruction of a device that is supposed to protect the servers in the building from power surges and give the servers power in case all of the power goes out. This catastrophic destruction looks like it sent a wave of energy through all of our computers, frying a number of them and making it impossible for the game to reboot back up. Cole spent the day today seeing what he could get back online from the Paizo offices. He was able to get the game servers to come back online, but there were a couple of problems. One is that it looks like a few of the map servers were fried during the surge. The good news is that we have some redundancy in our set-up and can move some map servers from ZOG into the live game, so he just needs to migrate the data over to them.

The thing that is more problematical is our web server. It is the way that the game authenticates who has paid for their account and who hasn't. It is where all purchases are made. And of course, it is where our forums are. For whatever reason, that baby isn't coming back online. So Cole is going to go down to the offsite building and he will have to physically see what is wrong. it may just require a good swift kick in the pants at the physical location to get it to reboot. But it may be fried. If the latter is the case, then Cole will need to figure out a new machine that we can use to run the website and get that configured. There are some issues with that that are too techy for me to try to explain. But I have been told it could take anywhere from hours to days. He won't really know until he gets down there and starts to try things to see what works.

The sad thing about all of this is that we were finally in the process of migrating all of our servers to the cloud. We are about a month or two from making that happen. So the plan now is to cobble things together so the game can run while Cole finishes that migration, and then we can kick the physical servers to the curb and be totally in the cloud.

So I don't know yet how long it is going to take until the game is back up and running. With a lot of luck, it could come up tomorrow. With a lot of bad luck, it could be weeks if we have to migrate it to the cloud first because nothing physical is going to work. On top of all of this, the way we normally communicate with everyone is on that web server, so we have no way to post about this or send emails to anybody. If you could all do me a favor and send this off to anybody you know who actively plays so they can pass it along to their community, that would help.

Obviously, I am sorry that this had to happen at a time when we are all stuck at home. And the COVID-19 crisis makes fixing this even harder as everything in Seattle is shut down until the beginning of May. I will let y'all know what happens tomorrow unless the game comes back online, in which case, you will already know that yourselves.

Stay safe!

Lisa Stevens

CEO

Paizo Inc.

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- Always gathering something. -- Also working a side project of building Cauchemar. -